Vinyl (Premium)

I previously defined a hipster as someone who is nostalgic for a past that they never experienced. It’s not a particularly unique idea, I know—the movie Midnight in Paris plumbs this notion of nostalgia pretty effectively—but whatever. I’ve found it amusing watching people embrace physical media, whether it’s books, movies, or music, during the shift to digital and streaming technologies in the early 21st century.

And I was never going to be that guy. Until I was. Well, sort of.

As I wrote recently in Music (Premium), I grew up loving music: I received my first album by the age of three and was collecting music by the time I became a teenager in the early 1980s. In that era, music was sold on vinyl and on cassette, and there were both singles and albums. And because my first stereo offered better quality playback with vinyl than it did with cassette tape, I purchased music on vinyl, and I used the stereo’s cassette recorder to make mixtapes I could enjoy with a Walkman and, later, in cars.

Albums were a thing when I was growing up. What I mean by that is that the shift to digital and streaming has somewhat obliterated the album, replacing it with singles and playlists, the modern mixtape. This shift happened early: One of the big complaints that record companies had about iTunes was that it made singles, which initially cost just 99 cents each, too attractive, while making albums, at $9.99 each, much less attractive.

As you may recall, I had a rule when it came to purchasing an album in the early 1980s: There had to be at least three good songs on that album before I made the purchase. In the world of iTunes, that rule wouldn’t make any sense, and in the subsequent streaming world of today, it makes even less sense since few are buying music in any form. We’re just renting it.

This wasn’t technology’s fault; technology just provided the final nails in the coffin. The quality of albums had been going downhill for years, if not decades, before Steve Jobs ever dreamed of killing Napster and making music downloads legit. By the time I started buying music 40 years ago, quality varied by album. There were perfect albums—Def Leppard’s Hysteria, Billy Joel’s Glass Houses, and so—but those were rare. More common were what I call perfect half-albums, like Def Leppard’s Adrenalize or Billy Joel’s The Nylon Curtain. And more common still, of course, was the bad albums, with perhaps just one or two good songs.

Perfect albums required some attention. They could be listened to from front to back with no skipping of songs. One could listen on headphones, which in those days were generally larger over-the-ear models that blocked out the outside world and created a more immersive listening experience. And albums themselves, thanks to their large form factor, were often entertaining and educational themselves, thanks to the liner notes and song lyrics. The lack of either was always disappointing.

Albums, especially on vinyl, can be problematic too. Each album side can only hold roughly 20 minutes of music, so you must physically flip it over to hear the second half. This reality determined the length of albums for decades because it was expensive to press and sell double albums, and as we moved forward to audio CDs, that limitation evolved to one in which it was hard to fit over 60 minutes of music on a single disc. At least we never needed to flip CDs over.

But the appeal of the album, especially of those perfect and near-perfect examples, remains. It’s still a thing, especially for those, like me, who still listen to music from eras in which albums still mattered. But things change, of course.

In the 80s, we could consume music in a variety of ways, and in a growing number of places. Albums were reserved for home—though, oddly enough, I knew someone who actually had a turntable in their car, believe it or not—and for dedicated listening sessions. We could record albums to tape (or buy them that way) and listen in the car or out in the world with a Walkman. Or we could record mix tapes, as I did, taking control of song order away from some producer and band. I did all of that.

In subsequent eras, technology evolved. CDs happened and then became recordable several years later, leading to a time of mix CDs, and CD changers in cars. And then digital music happened. We bought music outright, in digital formats, but people like me who had sometimes vast libraries of music in physical formats started digitizing their collections too. Sometimes more than once: I did an initial pass through my CD collection in a lower-quality MP3 format, later re-recorded the whole thing using WMA, and then eventually did much of it again in higher-quality AAC.

But in today’s world, most people consume music today via some streaming service. Even many old-timers like me do this: In recent years, I’ve subscribed to the premium version of Google Play Music and then YouTube Music in part because these services allowed me to upload any songs I had in my personal collection that couldn’t be found in the cloud. I can mix and match the old with the new.

It’s possible to listen to albums via streaming services, of course. More common, however, are Internet radio stations in which some service creates what are essentially playlists for you. And some, like me, create custom playlists of their own. It’s the modern version of the 1980s mixtape.

Concurrent to all this, the ways in which we listen to that music have evolved too. I haven’t had a stereo component in my house in decades—l literally can’t remember—but we’ve gone through any number of digital solutions for playing music around the mouse, from digital music receivers to Windows Media Center to Bluetooth speakers to Chromecast Audio attached to powered speakers. More recently, we began moving, tentatively at first, into the Sonos ecosystem.

This started several years ago when we still lived in Dedham. I purchased a Sonos:1 speaker at some point and, happy with the quality and service compatibility, purchased a second Sonos:1 and created a stereo pair. I purchased some small triangular shelves, mounted the speakers in the corner of our living room, and listened to music there, often on nights when my wife was out with friends or whatever. I started creating playlists in whatever service(s) I used at the time, since I had been making such things my whole life. (And they could come with me on the go thanks to whatever MP3 player or, later, phones I had at the time).

Many nights, my wife would come home from whatever outing and would want to listen to music with me. That evolved into nights in which that was just what we did. And we’ve had some fun events with friends, sometimes but not always on New Year’s Eve, in which each person contributes songs to a new playlist that grew over the course of the night. I still have many of those.

Our use of Sonos equipment grew over the years, but slowly because Sonos is very expensive. I went with a Chromecast Audio and a nice pair of powered bookshelf speakers for several years because they were a much better value. But reliability became problematic, and I began looking elsewhere. Eventually, I realized that Sonos made the most sense despite the upfront costs, and when Brad offered me a pair of used Play:5s at half price, my fate was sealed.

And then the pandemic happened. As I wrote in The Lure of Sonos (Premium), we purchased a lot of Sonos equipment over this past year, and we did so because we started spending more and more time listening to music. What used to be something we did roughly twice a month became a weekly tradition. These days, we set aside one night just for music, but we usually listen to some music, for an hour or so, on other nights as well.

It was this experience that led us down that most unlikely of paths. I had been creating more and more playlists over the course of our nearly four years in Pennsylvania, and my wife and I would make these listening times somewhat interactive in that we’d insert or skip songs as the mood took us. But I wanted more variety. I created a playlist that focused on the best songs by particular bands, where each band would get three songs in a row, and we made that interactive by voting on our favorites before adding them. Eventually, we moved to full playlists of individual artists.

And then one night, I asked my wife if she remembered any perfect albums. As we shared our choices, I realized that most—but not all—of them were purchases made when we were young, in the album era of the 1980s. That doesn’t mean that all of that music was from the 1980s, of course: Both of us grew up with an appreciation of music from earlier eras as well. And as I thought about this, I recalled listening to vinyl albums. The attentiveness of that experience.

And it occurred to me that one thing we’ve lost in recent years, and not just with music, is this attentiveness, this notion of being in the moment. The ability to skip a song at any time or just play whatever song you want right now is obviously magical in its own right. But it also contributes to what I see as this broader issue of attention span. If you can find a perfect album, it is a thing in its own right. It can be enjoyed as a whole, and not just sampled here and then.

Vinyl is not perfect, of course, and its deficiencies are obvious. In addition to the time limits of the form, they scratch and attract dust and debris and can skip. They’re supposedly fragile, though that’s not really the case, especially with more modern vinyl albums, which are much thicker and of higher quality than many of the albums I grew up with. (Some are colored vinyl, too, which is kind of fun.) They are very expensive, and some popular albums can be hard to find, especially at semi-reasonable prices. They’re not portable in any way, and they take up lots of space. They are, in short, inconvenient.

But given how our music listening had evolved throughout 2020, I felt there might be a way to incorporate vinyl albums into our experience in a way that made some sense. I wasn’t sure whether my wife would even want to go down this route, or would even appreciate it. But I ordered a Fluance RT81 turntable for my wife’s birthday in January, plus two albums—Taylor Swift’s Folklore (in a limited edition red vinyl double-album) and Collective Soul’s Blood—that I knew to be perfect albums that my wife liked. (That both are recent releases and not from 40 years ago is, I think, interesting. There are still perfect albums to be had here in the 2020s.)

My intention was to surprise her, of course, but the day that the turntable arrived, Stephanie answered the door and saw what it was, so I had to explain what was happening. She loved this idea, and she asked if we could get started immediately even though her birthday was still weeks away. And so off we went.

Since that first night, we’ve purchased several more vinyl records. Some were purchased online at Amazon, of course, but some were purchased in local record stores, the type of outing we hadn’t gone on in, well, decades. It’s fun to thumb through the racks looking for something familiar, something perfect. That’s definitely part of the appeal.

As for the listening experience, the turntable I bought has a built-in pre-amp, so it can be connected directly to one of the Sonos:5 speakers, and the system switches to that input automatically as you move the tonearm over the album. The sound quality is excellent, and this bit is interesting to me. On my particular system, the line-in sound level is a bit lower than when the speaker is used with streaming services, though I feel I could probably adjust that. But the sound itself? Amazing. It is a credit to the inventors of this technology that it sounds this good over 100 years later. It almost doesn’t make sense, like it’s alien technology.

That said, you may have heard that analog audio in general, and vinyl records in particular, sound “warmer” than digital audio, and many audiophiles feel that it is somehow superior regardless. That’s not been our experience, but the audio quality we’re getting from vinyl absolutely rivals that of any digital audio source. Is, for all intents and purposes, identical. And that alone is an achievement.

Our goal with vinyl is to use it for what I call mindful listening. It’s a deliberate thing, where we’re reading along with the lyrics in the liner notes. We’re paying attention to the music, really listening. Now, we’ll typically start a music night with a full album and then switch to digital. Sometimes that will be an exploration of the album’s artist’s other music. Sometimes it will just be a regular playlist I created.

To be clear, we’re not “going vinyl” or switching to vinyl, of whatever. It’s just something we’ve added to the mix. And I don’t recommend vinyl to others for all the reasons noted above. It’s expensive and inconvenient, and it’s not for everyone.

But it is a step that we took, and we’ve enjoyed doing it. The purchasing is already slowing down, and we’ll probably visit record stores once a month or whatever going forward and treat it as an outing. I don’t think we’re ever going to have a huge collection. We mostly stick with what we feel are perfect albums, though we’ve already purchased a few non-perfect entries because the price was right. Yes’ 90124 on vinyl for $4.99? Sure, why not? (That one is a perfect half-album, I guess.) It’s additive, and not a replacement for everything else we do.